Jakarta, CNNI Indonesia —
Researchers have discovered a type of freshwater plankton called Halteria that like to eat virus. It was also crowned as the first microorganism that preys on many triggers pandemic it’s on purpose.
Viruses are actually often accidentally consumed by various organisms. It is even a food seasoning for some marine protists.
But to qualify as part of the food chain, viruses must provide significant amounts of energy or nutrients to their consumers.
According to KBBI, protists are a class of creatures (besides flora and fauna), made up of organisms that have a simple biological structure, including protozoa, algae, fungi, and bacteria.
Reported ScienceAlert, this is what happened to Halteria, a genus (class) of common protists. Halteria moved in the water using vibrating hairs (cilia).
Experts discovered this after adding chlorovirus (chlorovirus) to a pool of water containing Halteria and another microorganism, namely Paramecium. The Paramecium eat the virus but their bodies do not enlarge.
Things were different with Halteria, whose corps had grown larger and its population had increased approximately 15 times in two days. On the other hand, the chlorovirus population in the pool has decreased dramatically.
“First of all, it’s just a guess that there are more Halteria,” said University of Nebraska-Lincoln ecologist John DeLong.
“But they’ve gotten big enough that you can actually take a few with an eyedropper, put them in a clean container, and count them,” she says.
This phenomenon makes experts evaluate that the habit of eating this virus has a major impact on the carbon cycle. This is because organisms infected with chlorovirus usually explode and release carbon and other nutrients into the environment.
“If you make a rough estimate of how much virus there is, how many ciliates and how much water there is, the result is a huge movement of energy up the food chain,” DeLong said.
“If this happens on the scale we think it will, it should completely change our view of the global carbon cycle,” he added.
This research is said to have been conducted over three years proving that there are some good things about viruses if you are the organism consuming them, ranging from amino acids, nucleic acids, lipids, nitrogen, to phosphorus.
This same study was published in the journal PNAS. From this study, it is also known that Halteria is estimated to “eat about 104 to 106 virions (fully formed and mature viruses) can be eaten per day in a small pond”
Not only that, Halteria also converted nearly 1/5 of the mass of the chlorovirus into its own mass.
(lom/lth)
